Towards Highly Expressive Machine Learning Models of Non-Melanoma Skin Cancer

Pathologists have a rich vocabulary with which they can describe all the nuances of cellular morphology. In their world, there is a natural pairing of images and words. Recent advances demonstrate that machine learning models can now be trained to learn high-quality image features and represent them as discrete units of information. This enables natural language, which is also discrete, to be jointly modelled alongside the imaging, resulting in a description of the contents of the imaging. Here we present experiments in applying discrete modelling techniques to the problem domain of non-melanoma skin cancer, specifically, histological images of Intraepidermal Carcinoma (IEC). Implementing a VQ-GAN model to reconstruct high-resolution (256x256) images of IEC images, we trained a sequence-to-sequence transformer to generate natural language descriptions using pathologist terminology. Combined with the idea of interactive concept vectors available by using continuous generative methods, we demonstrate an additional angle of interpretability. The result is a promising means of working towards highly expressive machine learning systems which are not only useful as predictive/classification tools, but also means to further our scientific understanding of disease.

Machine Learning for Air Transport Planning and Management

In this work we compare the performance of several machine learning algorithms applied to the problem of modelling air transport demand. Forecasting in the air transport industry is an essential part of planning and managing because of the economic and financial aspects of the industry. The traditional approach used in airline operations as specified by the International Civil Aviation Organization is the use of a multiple linear regression (MLR) model, utilizing cost variables and economic factors. Here, the performance of models utilizing an artificial neural network (ANN), an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS), a genetic algorithm, a support vector machine, and a regression tree are compared to MLR. The ANN and ANFIS had the best performance in terms of the lowest mean squared error.